AnaMary Bilbao (PT/ES) is a visual artist born in Lisbon whose practice is drawn to images that never fully stabilise. Fragmentation, transition, incompleteness, error and failure recur throughout her work, producing images that remain open and permeable rather than resolving into fixed forms. This instability is not treated as a formal effect alone, but as a way of thinking through the structures through which images – and the realities they help organise – acquire meaning.
Over the past years, animation has become a privileged field for this enquiry. In analogue animation, its frame-by-frame construction exposes the image as an accumulation of partial states, assembled across the intervals between individual frames. With generative AI, that unit shifts from the single frame to the generated temporal segment: a few seconds of movement are temporarily delegated to the system before being reworked, interrupted and returned to it again. In different ways, both processes make continuity visible as something constructed rather than given, opening the image to its unresolved states.
An extended period in New York marked an important shift in this trajectory. Bilbao was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in 2022 and subsequently studied film and animation at Mono No Aware. Work developed during this period was later presented by Mono No Aware at Anthology Film Archives and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Her work has also been presented at Galeria Zé dos Bois, Galerias Municipais – EGEAC, MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, ISCP, Paris Photo / Curiosa, Photo Basel, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and Batalha Centro de Cinema, among others. Bilbao has received support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), and in 2024 received the EDP Foundation/MAAT Acquisition Award.
In 2023, Bilbao completed a PhD in Artistic Studies at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), with research periods at Birkbeck, University of London, and in Johannesburg, where she worked in proximity to William Kentridge’s studio.
Alongside her studio practice, Bilbao occasionally writes essays on artists – a way of remaining in conversation with art and with what it makes possible to think. These texts have been commissioned by museums, art publications and academic journals.Bilbao gratefully acknowledges the role that acquisitions by public and private collections have played in sustaining the development of her practice. Her work is held by the following collections and institutions:
Fundação EDP / MAAT
Santander Totta Consumer
Galeria Zé dos Bois
Fundação Leal Rios
Maria e Armando Cabral
Fundação PLMJ
António Cachola / MACE
Portuguese State Contemporary Art Collection (CACE)
Julião Sarmento
Arte Contemporânea Figueiredo Ribeiro / quARTel
Marin Gaspar
C.M.S. – Câmara Municipal de Sintra / MU.SA
As well as private collections in Portugal, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Brazil, Canada, the United States and Hong Kong.